Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 53.djvu/51

 nition of his services, and was promoted to be brevet major on 29 Sept. 1814. He left England again at once, with reinforcements under Sir Edward Michael Pakenham [q. v.], and joined the British land and sea forces before New Orleans on 25 Dec. Pakenham took the command ashore, and Smith resumed his duties as assistant adjutant-general. In the unsuccessful attack on New Orleans on 8 Jan. 1815 Pakenham was killed. Sir John Lambert assumed the command, appointed Smith his military secretary, and employed him to negotiate with the enemy. During the night a truce for two days was with difficulty effected by Smith, who passed and repassed frequently between the opposing forces.

Smith sailed in the fleet with the expedition, on 27 Jan., to attempt the capture of Mobile, one hundred miles to the eastward of New Orleans. Troops were landed to attack Fort Bowyer and on Ile Dauphine, on the opposite side of the entrance. On the completion of the siege approaches to Fort Bowyer, Smith was sent in with a summons to surrender. The commandant, having elicited from Smith that the place would certainly be taken if stormed, capitulated on 11 Feb. On the 14th hostilities ceased, news having arrived that preliminaries of peace between England and the United States had been settled at Ghent on 24 Dec. 1814. When intelligence of the ratification of the treaty arrived on 5 March, the force embarked, and Smith reached England in time to proceed to the Netherlands as assistant quartermaster-general to the sixth division of the army of the Duke of Wellington. Smith was at Waterloo, and accompanied the allied army to Paris. He was made C.B., military division, and promoted brevet lieutenant-colonel from 18 June 1815. He received the Waterloo medal, and the war medal with twelve clasps for the Peninsula. Subsequently he filled the post of major de place at Cambray, where the Duke of Wellington fixed his headquarters during the occupation of France by the allied troops. He returned to England in 1818, and served with the 2nd battalion of the rifle brigade in Shorncliffe, Gosport, Glasgow, Belfast, and Nova Scotia. On 19 Dec. 1826 he became unattached. On 23 Nov. 1826 Smith was appointed deputy quartermaster-general of the forces in Jamaica. On 24 July 1828 he was transferred, in the same capacity, to the Cape of Good Hope, under his old commander in the occupation of Paris, Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole [q. v.], then governor and commanding the forces in Cape Colony. On the outbreak of the Kaffir war, at the end of 1834, Sir Benjamin D'Urban [q. v.], who had succeeded Sir Lowry Cole, appointed Smith to be colonel on the staff and commandant of the regular and burgher forces, and second in command in the colony from 1 Jan. 1835. Smith at once rode from Cape Town to Graham's Town, accomplishing the seven hundred miles, over a rough and roadless country, in the extraordinarily short period of six days. The feat is still deservedly remembered in the colony as ‘an historical ride.’ In February he left Graham's Town with a force of eleven hundred men to clear the country between the Fish and the Keiskamma rivers. On 12 Feb. he fought a successful action with the Kaffirs. In March he prepared a central camp at Fort Willshire, where three thousand troops were assembled before advancing. He had another successful action with the Kaffirs on 7 April at T'Slambies Kop, and towards the end of the month carried on operations in Hintza's country across the Kei river. Hintza, the chief of the Amakosa Kaffirs, gave himself up as a hostage, but played false, and endeavouring to escape on 12 May, when riding with Smith on the march with his column, was pursued and overtaken by Smith, who dragged him from his saddle. Hintza, however, managed to get away, and was shot the same day in the bush by Lieutenant George Southey, whom he was about to assegai. On 28 May Smith took a column of six hundred men to clear the country near the sea and examine the mouth of the Buffalo river. On 4 June he made another expedition, scouring the country about the river Keiskamma, when the war practically came to an end.

The Kei river was made the new boundary, and the country between the Great Fish and the Kei rivers was annexed and secured by a series of forts. On Sir Benjamin D'Urban leaving the front for Graham's Town on 10 June, he appointed Smith to command the troops and to administer the new province of ‘Queen Adelaide,’ as he named it. On 17 Sept. a formal treaty with the Kaffir chiefs was concluded by Smith at Fort Willshire, and a commission, over which Smith presided, was appointed to carry it into effect. As chief commissioner Smith defined the boundaries of the land given to each tribe, and reduced the country to order. Unfortunately, the labour of the commission was speedily undone by Lord Glenelg, secretary of state for the colonies. In consequence of Lord Glenelg's action, Smith returned to Cape Town and resumed his duties as deputy quartermaster-general on 30 Sept. 1836. Although Glenelg wrote to Smith in September 1837 praising the latter's ‘zealous, humane, and enlightened administration,’ he considered the Kaffirs the aggrieved party